Nvidia discloses $21B stake in SpaceX

Nvidia has committed more than $100 billion to AI companies in the past two years, with sizeable investments in cloud-computing startup CoreWeave and AI labs Thinking Machines and Safe Superintelligence, as well as code-editing startup Cursor, which SpaceX acquired this week for $60 billion. This week it disclosed plans to assemble over $500 billion from a consortium of investors including Apollo Global, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to help finance its customers, with Nvidia partially guaranteeing loans backed by the value of its chips. The financing push is meant to accelerate AI infrastructure construction and bind more of the industry to Nvidia's technology.

Nvidia's newly disclosed $21 billion stake in SpaceX accompanies the rocket maker's plan to increase its computing capacity from 2 gigawatts at the end of this year to "closer to 10GW than 5GW" by the end of 2027, Elon Musk told investors last week. SpaceX's IPO handed huge returns to early backers. Google, which owns roughly 7 percent of SpaceX after originally investing $900 million in 2015, told investors in July that its stake was valued at about $94 billion.

The deal underscores how AI-driven compute demand is reshaping the space industry and tying major players like SpaceX into Nvidia's broader investment and financing ecosystem.